Take Two, They're Fast . . . Why I Read More Than One Book at a Time

Some book lovers are monogamous: they read one book at a time, and finish it before picking up the next. Others are what we might call polybiblious: We like to read more than one book at the same time.

I suspect it’s a habit I developed in college, when every day I had to read different books for different classes. Some were history, some were historical novels, some were critical analyses of poetry and fiction.

Today, more than 30 years out of school, I still prefer to read two (or three, or four) books simultaneously. This morning, for instance, I read 15 or 20 pages of the third (translated) installment of a wonderfully dark series of police procedurals set in Iceland, by Arnaldur Indriðason, titled The Draining Lake. Once I’d arrived at the coffee shop where I could relax and spread out before a video shoot, I put that one in my bag and returned to about page 320 of Believing the Lie, the seventeenth and latest Inspector Lynley mystery by Elizabeth George.

Sometimes, you’re forced by external circumstances to read more than one book at a time. There’s the book you most want to read, and the book or two that you have to read … because the book group is meeting to discuss it in a few days, because it’s due at the library and someone else has placed a reserve request on it, or because (occasionally, in my case) you’ve promised to review it for someone. But I also like to read two or three books at once, most of the time. Rather than grind away at one to the finish before turning to another, my mind likes a change of pace, scene, or style after an hour or two, and most books take longer than that.

Usually, the best combination is a nonfiction book and a novel. Here’s why. Say you get engrossed in the fiction and feel compelled to finish the story. If the other one you’re reading is biography, history, or science, that’s easier to put aside and come back to after a week -- even a month or more -- and not feel the story’s gone cold. That doesn’t work so well with literature or a thriller, where you strain to recall who’s who and what was happening when you put it down.

As fascinating as it can be, nonfiction doesn’t often zing and zip as often as a good thriller, so whether the nonfiction I’m currently enjoying is a fat or thin tome, I often get through two, three, or more novels before I finish the nonfiction alternative. More than a decade ago, I steadily renewed a library copy of Norman Davies’s Europe: A History -- a rich 1,365 pages -- for almost a year, leaving it fallow for months on end before finally reaching the final page. It’s a wonderful book, but still a bit of a slog.

I must have started and finished dozens of other books before completing the Davies and returning it to the Multnomah County Library. I don’t know whether to be pleased that I got to keep it that long or saddened that apparently no one else was interested in it.

Which is not to say I never read two or three novels at once. Over the past year, my growing thirst for mysteries and police procedurals has had me simultaneously enjoying tales from different continents (Henning Mankell’s Swedish mysteries; or Colin Cotterill’s adventures of Dr. Siri, a septuagenarian coroner in Laos) and time periods (Bruce Alexander’s 17th-century London magistrate, Sir John Fielding, and Philip Kerr’s hard-boiled private eye in Nazi Berlin and post-war Argentina, Bernie Gunther). Witness this morning’s adventures of Iceland and Scotland Yard detectives.

When you’re dependent on the library for most of your reading material, there is an element of gambling to this process. Every once in a while, a request from another reader catches you in the middle of a book you’re really enjoying. Then you’re faced with a rock-versus-hard-place choice: put the others aside and finish the book, with a risk of going overdue and having to pay the fine, or return it half finished.

I think I have done the latter once or twice, and immediately entered another loan request to get the book back as soon as possible, but that’s so unpleasant that I usually choose to keep reading and pay the fine.

A Quick Shift in Gear

On March 18 and 24, I posted the first two parts of what I expected would be a series of columns on my latest adventure as an actor, which involved a brief appearance on a current television show. If you managed to read them, good for you.

However, I was advised to take the pieces offline because the network reportedly takes a dim view of any public discussion of a particular episode before it airs, and whether or not my carefully phrased posts were likely to offend the powers-that-be, it was thought best to remove them. So I've done that. I fully intend to re-post them, and more, after the particular show gets broadcast, but until then we'll just have to wait.


The initial section of the first one acknowledged the fact that "American Currents" had lain somewhat neglected since early February, and noted some of the previous activity on this site as follows.

Periodically, since this site became largely mine by default in the spring of 2010, I’ve taken readers on a series of junkets. There was the experiment in collecting recycled bottles and cans for cash redemption (five essays between May 15, 2010 and September 2, 2010), my adventures as an actor in 48-Hour Film Festival projects (which ran August 14, 2010; August 16, 2010; August 20, 2010; August 24, 2010; and September 16, 2010; and never got completed), and a quick three-fer in October 2010 about the use of obscenity in protesting military actions. I also wrote two columns about reading Proust.

Mouthing Off for the Mike and Cameras

Pop2Politics, a new show on BlogTalkRadio.com featuring myself as host, has been launched!

Believe me, this wasn’t my idea. Jeff Weiss, who conceived and established “American Currents” more than two years ago, and has maintained it as the power behind the throne (or the techie behind the Mouth -- that would be me), more recently inaugurated a pop culture talk show online called Pop2Reality.

That show, co-hosted by Jeff and Mark Roberts, features a weekly chat about celebrities and pop culture, focusing especially on reality TV shows. But Jeff’s a political junkie as well, and he wanted to get a second show going. He asked me to host it. Since he’s once again doing the heavy lifting from the production end, I’m willing to devote an hour or so to blathering out loud (and making a more conscientious effort to follow national and local political news with that end in view).

A Downside of Efficient and Over-teched Health Care

For any Americans prone to the assumption that U.S. wealth and capitalist “efficiency” make for inherently better health care and a safer population, think again.

An array of studies suggest that the U.S. has steadily become a more dangerous place for women to give birth than many other countries around the globe. Although this is not “news” in the sense of catching authorities by surprise, the average American probably isn’t aware of the facts, let alone the implications.

I ran across the story by chance in a Jan. 18 piece by Nicole Montesano in the McMinnville News-Register.  As Montesano stated in her lead, women in the U.S. are more likely to die in the course of childbirth than new mothers in most of Europe, quite a bit of Asia, and even the Middle East. While maternal mortality has declined in most countries over the past 20 years, it has almost doubled back home. (Note a sharply worded dissent in the comments section by an apparent female physician, though. I also will note a few disagreements with various aspects of these claims below.)

What are the possible reasons for this apparent rise in maternal mortality here? A crossfire of factors come into play, including:

·      Rising age and obesity among expectant mothers in the U.S., both of which correlate with greater risk in carrying a baby to term

·      Less access to regular medical care among African-American women, who are therefore four times as likely to die during or shortly after childbirth

·      Relative infrequency of pre- and post-partum health care for all mothers and infants in the U.S.; apparently, national health care systems like those in Canada and Western Europe require more pre-natal medical visits and provide more care after birth than U.S. insurance companies do (or new mothers are inclined to seek)

The Day It Rained Indoors

Sunday night, I finally threw them in the dumpster.

It was a stack of books, coated with a film of sickly grey dust . . . mold that had been growing for more than two years. I had held on to them this long because, on the one hand, I needed to check which pieces of my collection were a dead loss so I could adjust my records, and on the other, I wasn’t eager to face the task. So they had stayed in storage until I could get around to it.

This unpleasantness goes back to late August 2009. I had lost my job the month before and was in the process of applying for unemployment benefits and looking for temp work.

And then our storage closet, on the top floor of the apartment building -- the seventh floor, mind you -- suffered a leak. The HVAC system for the supermarket on the ground floor broke down and leaked water into the roof, which seeped through the concrete and onto my stored boxes of books, photo albums, papers, compact discs, and videos.

You can see in this first photo how the moisture dripped down from the ceiling on the very top of a high stack of boxes, and smeared the label “Photos” on the top one on its way down to others below. It wasn’t a flood, per se, but for mostly paper goods, it was enough, particularly since the cardboard absorbed the water and held it so it had plenty of time to seep into the contents of each box.

In itself, the disaster was tough to take, but its timing was another punch in the ribs. In just a few days I was committed to leave on an expensive, packaged vacation Carole and I had planned for months. I had only a couple days to try to dry out my valuables, get some sense of the damage, put it all away somehow, and pack up and go (and trust that my stuff in the closet would not get rained on again when I was away and could do nothing about it!).

Happy New Year, but No, Thank You . . . No Resolutions

With the New Year come the usual print and broadcast stories about resolutions -- the ones we make and perennially break. It’s a ritual as dependable as Easter eggs and July firecrackers.

My local paper reports that Portlanders are crowding gyms across the city, and getting a brave start on what is evidently a common New Year’s resolution: to lose weight and build muscle, especially after six to eight weeks of steady holiday dining.

What’s interesting (but rather a sad commentary on the clash between declining newspaper resources and readership versus increasing dependence on the Internet on the part of both newspaper reporters and their current and former readers), is the fact that the lead-off sentence in the Oregonian print story, and the headline for yesterday’s online version . . . is pretty stale news. It may not even be accurate.

A little digging by the discriminating news consumer reveals that the “fact” that four out of five gym memberships go unused is based on a survey more than six years old. This week’s story in the Oregonian links to a Livestrong.com report from last April. You have to read to the very bottom of that one, in the eighth and final paragraph, to learn that the relevant statistic, “80 percent of 40 million Americans” is attributed to Medical News Today, but there’s no link.

Jack London, Socialism, and Occupy Portland

Jack London’s birthday is coming up in a few weeks. This January 12, 2012, would be the 136th anniversary of his birth in San Francisco, back in 1876 (the U.S. centennial, one may note).

There’s a basement bar here in Portland called the Jack London, downstairs from a venerable lounge on 4th Avenue known as the Rialto. (For many, many years -- until less than a decade ago, I believe -- the latter had a huge misspelled sign out front that identified it to passing drivers on 4th as the “Railto”; now that it has been corrected, I wish I had taken a photo of that.)

The Jack London Bar is not venerable; it opened only last June, although it took its name from an ancient, unlamented fleabag hotel at that location called the Jack London.

The bar has garnered decent Internet reviews for a mid-sized dance floor, laser lights, “makeout-friendly dark corners and couches,” and other nightclub amenities. But the management also has been collaborating with the Oregon Historical Society to host lectures on local history, culture, and celebrities.

Which is how I discovered the place: I dropped in on Nov. 8 to listen to a talk about Tom Burns, a Portland eccentric who owned a bookshop on West Burnside between 3rd and 4th avenues, and used to make speeches on street corners which got him repeatedly hauled in by the police for attacking city government and advocating socialism.

This experience was not unknown to the future author of The Call of the Wild and “To Build a Fire.” After a colorful youth that included long hours working in a cannery at age 13, making an illegal living as an oyster pirate a couple years later and then turning around and serving the law as an employee of the California Fish Patrol, serving on a ship to Japan at 17, getting busted for vagrancy in Buffalo and doing a month in a penitentiary after crossing the U.S. as a tramp, and bulling his way into UC Berkeley at 20, Jack London also made socialist speeches in public (in City Hill Park, Oakland) and got arrested for it.

Raking Leaves and Revolution

I ran into an acquaintance Thursday afternoon, the day my picture appeared in the local paper raking leaves at the Occupy Portland camp site Wednesday morning.

It had been 31 days since the police evicted the campers, and 31 days that the squares had been fenced off so that no one -- neither the Occupiers nor the general public -- could take a step into those downtown blocks.

The City Parks and Recreation Department had originally planned to let volunteers onto the site to rake leaves on Nov. 23, only 10 days after “eviction,” but recent rains had made the job much less feasible and appetizing, so the job was postponed.

Good thing it was; Portland had pretty much no rain the first two weeks of December, so by this last Wednesday the ground and dead foliage were pretty dry and manageable. Poetically, a light rain finally fell Wednesday evening, hours after we finished.

Getting Occupy on the Program

The ex-Marine had served four tours of duty in Iraq. I went up to him after the meeting and asked him, “Looking back on your military service, do you feel that you were defending liberty and freedom?”

“Absolutely not,” he replied. “That’s what radicalized me.” He now works with and speaks for a veteran-run, anarchist collective known as Rose City Resistance. There is a growing, committed anarchist movement of military vets, he continued. Sort of like recovering Catholics, I suggested; he grinned and nodded. When I told him I had recently seen an Internet graphic on Facebook that consists of a photo of soldiers in the field carrying a wounded comrade on a stretcher with the legend, “We were too busy defending your freedom to Occupy anything,” he almost growled.

I met this man Sunday afternoon in a meeting at the Ace Hotel, SW 10th and Stark, organized by The Bus Project and The Portland Mercury. The former is a volunteer-driven nonprofit that works to get young people involved in political activism, the latter an alternative free weekly newspaper. (The founder of The Bus Project, Jefferson Smith, currently a state representative for House District 47, is also running for mayor of Portland.) They had brought in legislative activists, community organizers, representatives from Mayor Sam Adams’s and U.S. Senator Merkley’s offices, and the vet and a self-described “1 percenter” to exchange ideas with Occupy Portland vets and sympathizers about future directions for the movement.

I’m not going to write about what we heard and talked about there . . . not because it was particularly pithy or deserves top-secret protection; like most Occupy and post-Occupy events, such as the MoveOn.org gathering at Senator Wyden’s office I wrote about in my last blog commentary, it was more about getting to know people, seeing a few familiar faces, and learning a couple useful things for future activity.

Occupy Forever!

It’s weird to feel nostalgia about something that happened only a few weeks ago.

I’m not talking about looking back on a great meal, or recalling a terrific vacation, or even contemplating the memory of a distant teenage kiss.

I’m talking about a big event, something far bigger than you or me and everyone we know; so big it made the nightly news and splashed all over the Internet and our social media networks for weeks on end. And we were a part of it. But now it’s gone and it’s like . . . history.

But it was only a few weeks ago.

That feels weird.

Thursday evening I went to a photo exhibition at a local gallery -- really, little more than a live-in, street-level loft. Quite appropriate for the contents, actually, which were 140 photos of the people, places, and events of Occupy Portland.

The photographer, Mark Kronquist, says he shot 12,000 images over the course of Occupy Portland’s downtown sojourn between October 6 and November 15. He also collected some signs and other mementoes from the camp, and hopes to turn it all over to the Oregon Historical Society (OHS).

Occupy Portland, part 10 - Was the Message Lost? And Who's the 99%?

Though things have grown quieter on the Occupy Portland front, the misleading news coverage goes on.

I checked the 11 o’clock editions of the local news Tuesday night, and though stormy winter weather had become the top story, more than one station reported that “Occupy Portland had cost the city $1.29 million in police overtime.” This of course is misleading, because the city committed those resources without ascertaining whether it really needed to. As this past weekend’s protests showed and I discussed in my last commentary, it may not have.

Among other things, the story in Tuesday’s Oregonian notes that the Police Bureau spent $4,000 in overtime in early September before police ever encountered any protesters -- “to prepare” to handle them, whatever that means. Lt. Robert King, a police spokesman, commented Tuesday that “Last weekend, we were able to pull back and they were able to march on the sidewalk and follow rules and laws….”

Actually, the police weren’t “able” to stop using so much manpower; they simply chose to give it a try, and found that it worked: “The bureau didn’t incur any overtime costs Saturday or Sunday.” It might have worked all along -- if the police bureau had been intelligent enough to attempt it sooner -- and saved much of the money the news stations said that “Occupy cost the city.”

Occupy Portland, part 9 - Latest News, and a Look at the Criticism

A little more than 24 hours ago, Portland Police Chief Mike Reese admitted that his assertion to the press Thursday, that a rape victim had been neglected because of the demands of policing Occupy Portland, was not exactly accurate.

Moreover, he acknowledged in the same Portland Police Bureau news release what I asserted in my last commentary: that all the police resources employed over the past five weeks (and all the overtime money that Occupy critics have been bleating about) -- especially over the last seven days -- might not have been necessary after all.

“Today, we tried something new,” the chief declared in yesterday’s statement. “Our Incident Commander … met with protesters before a march and asked if they wanted a police escort. When they told him no, he asked that they self-police their event and obey the law; police would only respond if there were complaints. The march participants agreed, and the event proceeded without any problems, or a police presence.”

The implicit message here, whether the chief will admit it on the record or not, is that the police were clearly a part of the problem -- possibly even the primary cause of disorder -- over the past week or more. If they’re not out in force to order, demand, and provoke, then Occupy protesters are less likely to pose a problem to anyone else.

Simple, yes? Why did this not occur to anyone before? (Actually, it did . . . to the progressive Mayor and police of Lansing, Michigan, though admittedly they’ve had to deal with a much smaller group of demonstrators -- but the collaborative approach between protesters and authorities is the essential point here.)

Occupy Portland, part 8 - Aftermath . . . and Prelude

It is almost exactly a week since zero hour for the Occupy Portland camp -- the Sunday morning, 12:01 a.m. “eviction” deadline set by Mayor Sam Adams.

The camp didn’t really get “swept” until the following afternoon, in a masterful display of tactical strategy and mostly smooth execution by Portland Police, with a lot of assistance from outside law enforcement agencies. Part of me felt, and continues to feel, that the camp had run its course, and it was just as well that it ended when and as it did.

Things have gotten uglier, unfortunately … though not half as bad as the local media and police have tried to make them appear. Marches and small localized protests have continued daily. Thursday, November 17, was the two-month anniversary of the launch of Occupy Wall Street, and Portland avidly joined in the demonstrations that occurred all across the country to commemorate and celebrate it.

Occupy Portland, part 7 - I've Got a Bad Feeling About This

Tonight, I am in mourning. Perhaps that should be pre-mourning, because the death hasn’t happened yet, but I’m afraid it’s coming fast.

Two days ago, in my last commentary on this blog, I promised to give readers a tour of the Occupy Portland camp, but circumstances have overtaken me. It looks very much like push has come to shove in Stumptown, because Thursday morning the Mayor and Police Chief of Portland gave the protesters an eviction notice: they have been told to clear the parks they have occupied for the past five weeks by midnight Saturday, about 48 hours from now.

Mayor Sam Adams, who sympathizes with the political-economic goals of the Occupy movement, has decided that the protesters have lost too much support across the city for him to continue to allow them to camp on the site without a permit.

The real message is that Occupy Portland has lost the war for the hearts and minds of the rest of the city; at least, the mayor and many others in city government believe this to be the case, based on complaints from neighboring businesses, highly publicized if relatively isolated criminal incidents and arrests on or near the site, and the constant carping of ignorant critics on the websites of the newspaper and the various local news stations.

Occupy Portland, part 6 - An Interim Report, November 8, 2011

Conditions at the Occupy Portland site have settled into an ongoing if uneasy truce. An offshoot of the movement -- largely not in accord with the main body of protesters, as best as I understand it -- has been trying to create a permanent tent camp on federal land one block south of the main encampment.

The federal park is known as Terry Schrunk Plaza. It contains a grassy area that slopes gently down to a small brick amphitheater where I have watched friends perform Shakespeare in years past. Pictured below is the brick amphitheater space, where a band was setting up last Saturday afternoon to entertain the protesters. Schrunk Plaza is a public space that requires no permit or fees for temporary use, but overnight stays are prohibited.

Although Occupy Portland holds its General Assembly meeting, which can last two to four hours, in Schrunk Plaza every night at 7 p.m., the main body of the protesters understands and abides by the regulations to clear the area overnight. A splinter group has chained itself to one another and the site for the past three evenings; so far, the feds are holding back.

Coming in Sick to Work - Being a Standardized Patient

[ Just so everybody's clear that "American Currents" is still my general blog and not an "All Occupy/All the Time" station, here's a commentary on a different aspect of my recent activities. There will be more to come, on other topics, as well. Stay tuned. . . ]

Yesterday I had pneumonia, complicated by my asthma, high blood pressure, and one-pack-a-day smoking habit. On Wednesday I was blind as a complication from my diabetes.

Last year, I had heart disease, lower back pain, asthma, and a drinking problem I was not inclined to be readily honest about. I look forward someday to receiving a cancer diagnosis, thyroid condition, and a sexually transmitted disease . . . but probably not a positive Pap smear.

If you’re wondering what I’ve been doing in the hospital, I work now and then as a Standardized Patient (or “SP”). This means I pretend to be a patient in medical exams conducted by first-year, second-year, and third-year medical students, nurse practitioners, and naturopaths at several medical teaching institutions in the city.

Occupy Portland, part 5 - What Am I Doing Here?

When I got home from my first morning of volunteering at the Occupy Portland site, back on Friday, Oct. 21, I posted the following status update on my Facebook wall:

“Occupy Portland has become my church.”

It was an amorphous, gut-level notion that somehow accurately described my feelings coming out of (or maybe that should be “starting into”) the experience. The next day, a friend I hadn’t seen in many months asked me what I meant by it. I didn’t have a ready answer for her. I’ve thought about it ever since.

You should know that my real church history has been uneven and spotty to effectively nonexistent. When I was a kid, my folks took me to Sunday School at First Unitarian in Eugene. They themselves were probably agnostics at that point, but they liked the social conscience and activism of that congregation, especially its pastor, the Rev. Carl Nelson, who preached early and hard against the Vietnam War.

Occupy Portland, part 4 - You Know . . . Maybe They Really ARE Fighting Dirty

Take a look at the photographs in this column. Doesn’t it look like something significant happened here in Portland yesterday (Friday, October 28)?

A huge sound stage was set up in Pioneer Square, often referred to as “Portland’s Living Room.” A band made up of the youthful classical/jazz/Latin/swing band Pink Martini (they make their homes in Portland and they’re big in Europe), guest vocalist Storm Large, and some musicians from the Oregon Symphony formed the core of the event.

They performed three of their songs and led the crowd in singing almost a dozen classic pop, musical, and folk songs. Twelve different speakers, including two rabbis, three Protestant ministers, an Imam, two U.S. Congressmen, the state AFL-CIO president, and several activists and organizers addressed the crowd, to much cheering and applause. Starbucks handed out free coffee and chocolate at three different stands around the square.

Occupy Portland, part 3 - Democracy is Messy

[Events are taking place faster than I can keep up with them on my blog, so I’ve decided to provide links at the end of each commentary, where you can find information on news about Occupy Portland and upcoming events. Page down for those….]

I don’t want to leave the impression here that I think everything happening at the Occupy Portland camp is sweetness and light, or that I'm trying to sell that notion to anyone else.

There are many other topics I’d like to address about the protest, eventually -- such as the camp’s relations with the city government and Portland Police; the misleading spin (unintended or otherwise) contained in local TV news reports I have seen; the bigger mission and potential outcomes of the protest -- but at this point I felt I should talk about some of the problems I’ve witnessed or heard about.

As they say, democracy is messy.

Every night at 7 p.m., a General Assembly (GA) meeting takes places at Terry Schrunk Plaza, a small brick arena across Madison Street to the south of the encampment, which is federal land. My schedule hasn’t allowed me to make it to a GA meeting, but OP volunteers try to take notes and post them as soon as possible on the Occupy Portland website.

I understand that much of the discussion at General Assembly meetings has revolved around the same safety and security concerns that the greater public outside the camp has expressed: that Occupy Portland seems to include homeless persons, mentally ill folks, recreational drug consuming and dealing individuals, and possibly criminals. (The couple show here are NOT examples of these subgroups, but more typical citizens chatting on a bench in Chapman Square.)

Occupy Portland, part 2 - This Is Bigger Than You Think

On my first day volunteering for Occupy Portland, I verified a suspicion -- or maybe in the beginning it was just a hope -- that what we see in the camps, especially if we only watch the television news, is the tip of a possibly massive iceberg.

There are indeed a lot of regular folks who support this motley crowd, both in spirit and in deed.

And unlike an iceberg, the substance you see above the waterline is not the same as the material below. Although I saw plenty of middle-class visitors and suit-coated businesspeople who just strolled through the camp -- looking around or heading to and from work -- not a few of them meant business. I know, because they stopped to talk to me and hand me things while I was at the information desk (that's me on duty, at right).

A large middle-aged man in outdoor clothing advised me: “Yesterday the city of Portland got their property tax bills; you’ll get a lot of support from the middle if you go after the right targets.” A more sharply dressed man said he had done very well in real estate, appreciation, etc., and “I don’t pay very much taxes -- that’s why I donate so much. We’re fighting evil here.”

Carl Anderson, a military serviceman 30 years ago who since has worked “half my life” in the Wells Fargo Building, a white tower that overlooks the occupation site from the southwest, said his coffee breaks in the Occupy Portland site have gotten longer and longer. “You guys gotta stay here until the next presidential election, at least,” he remarked. He also mentioned that he has only 12 years left before he retires, and I thought to myself: I could never work at any job for that long.